Riverbend, Like the Earth, Abides
Not having looked in on Riverbend lately, or on anyone else during my latest sabbatical from the World of the Best-Informed -- my definition of the weblog scene -- yesterday I went to her site, "Baghdad Burning."
Riverbend is my very favorite Iraqi person and I pay a lot of attention to everything she says. By her careful and steady, in-depth narratives and expositions on day-to-day life in Iraq's capital city, I see her as being a much more relevant reporter on the Iraqi scene than any American media person or most Iraqis can be. Yet it is a measure of her supreme objectivity -- not thought to be common among her gender -- that it's been difficult to learn much about her personally.
She obviously doesn't wear the veils of Islam, yet, unless she has stepped farther out into the light lately, she has definitely and skillfully kept herself concealed behind a curtain of secrecy as far as her vital statistics are concerned, and I don't mean those of a pin-up girl. I have never seen her picture. I don't know any part of her real name. She is clearly familiar with the U.S. and the American idiom, which must mean she has attended school here, but if so, she has never said so in the posts I have read. I don't even know her age, though one of her antagonists said she is 24 or 25, and that seems about right.
While she has plenty of strong supporters like me, she also has lots of detractors, to the point that there have been and may still be several web sites set up specifically to deny and discolor everything she says, and that, as much as anything, is a tribute to the extraordinary power of her writing and her views.
These enemies accuse her of being a Baathist and a Saddam supporter. I don't know if that is true, but there's no denying that she sees things as being much worse now than they were in Iraq before the Bush invasion.
Every time I read about large numbers of people being killed in an explosion in Baghdad or some such, I worry that somehow River has gotten caught up in it, though I know that, mostly because she is a woman, she stays close to home. So you should be glad to hear that she is still okay, and still doing pretty much the same -- enduring the chronic water and electric shortages, hoping that Bush will pull out his troops within hours, and fearing, in their wake, the advent of a non-secular government that will curtail the rights and privileges of women.
In her latest post she reports that she did take an excursion into the streets the other day, accompanied by a male relative. They went to an Iraqi ministry to ask some questions. Predictably, despite the high intelligence that any fool must be able to see burning in her eyes, the people there pointedly tried to ignore her, much preferring to speak to the male relative. Finally, when she persisted in speaking up, they "broke bad" with her (as the idiom went in my early days) about the way she was dressed, including her lack of a veil, and she coldly broke right back bad with them.
I suppose that River had the option of shaking the Iraqi dust from her heels long ago and forever, and presumably still does. Yet she seems determined to stay right there in the midst of all the mess and see it out wherever it may lead. And I am confident that she will be among the first to see where it will all lead and to so inform us.
Riverbend is my very favorite Iraqi person and I pay a lot of attention to everything she says. By her careful and steady, in-depth narratives and expositions on day-to-day life in Iraq's capital city, I see her as being a much more relevant reporter on the Iraqi scene than any American media person or most Iraqis can be. Yet it is a measure of her supreme objectivity -- not thought to be common among her gender -- that it's been difficult to learn much about her personally.
She obviously doesn't wear the veils of Islam, yet, unless she has stepped farther out into the light lately, she has definitely and skillfully kept herself concealed behind a curtain of secrecy as far as her vital statistics are concerned, and I don't mean those of a pin-up girl. I have never seen her picture. I don't know any part of her real name. She is clearly familiar with the U.S. and the American idiom, which must mean she has attended school here, but if so, she has never said so in the posts I have read. I don't even know her age, though one of her antagonists said she is 24 or 25, and that seems about right.
While she has plenty of strong supporters like me, she also has lots of detractors, to the point that there have been and may still be several web sites set up specifically to deny and discolor everything she says, and that, as much as anything, is a tribute to the extraordinary power of her writing and her views.
These enemies accuse her of being a Baathist and a Saddam supporter. I don't know if that is true, but there's no denying that she sees things as being much worse now than they were in Iraq before the Bush invasion.
Every time I read about large numbers of people being killed in an explosion in Baghdad or some such, I worry that somehow River has gotten caught up in it, though I know that, mostly because she is a woman, she stays close to home. So you should be glad to hear that she is still okay, and still doing pretty much the same -- enduring the chronic water and electric shortages, hoping that Bush will pull out his troops within hours, and fearing, in their wake, the advent of a non-secular government that will curtail the rights and privileges of women.
In her latest post she reports that she did take an excursion into the streets the other day, accompanied by a male relative. They went to an Iraqi ministry to ask some questions. Predictably, despite the high intelligence that any fool must be able to see burning in her eyes, the people there pointedly tried to ignore her, much preferring to speak to the male relative. Finally, when she persisted in speaking up, they "broke bad" with her (as the idiom went in my early days) about the way she was dressed, including her lack of a veil, and she coldly broke right back bad with them.
I suppose that River had the option of shaking the Iraqi dust from her heels long ago and forever, and presumably still does. Yet she seems determined to stay right there in the midst of all the mess and see it out wherever it may lead. And I am confident that she will be among the first to see where it will all lead and to so inform us.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 11:53 AM
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